English
In his admirable book ´My life on rooftops0, the Samoan writer Albert Hanover has a marginal and delicate memory, like the corner of a miniature, for the Philosophy teacher who fell into luck during his years of preparative studies for university. His name was Thomas and his physical attitude in class – he never stopped walking around the classroom while he was articulating a speech of prodigious clarity – rhymed unbeatably with the drawings that in his Greek book represented a pair of peripatetic philosophers, like agreeing with Nietzsche about how you think better when walking.
On an occasion when Thomas seemed to be lost in a nostalgic delirium for an admirable past time, Hanover was moved to defy him with a question relative to the possible error of idealizing those times which had been socially unfair and if, wasn´t it more adequate to consider that in all historical times, different civilizations had behaved in a more or less monstrous way with large part of the human kind.
Without leaving his melancholic air, Thomas sighed, in a way which On an occasion when Thomas seemed to be lost in a nostalgic delirium for an admirable past time, Hanover would later associate with Joseph Cotten during his unforgettable speech about the automobile in ´The Magnificent Ambersons´ by Orson Welles, and he accepted that it was very possible but that, however, he couldn´t stop feeling that in some places and times (the Athens of Pericles, the Florence of the Quatrocento…) what we call culture expressed a certain awareness of the artistic dimension and the existance of the aspiration to live life as if it was an art, and it was that feeling of art life which made it better and special in his eyes.
To illustrate the case, through a dazzling selection of works of art of the period which coexists with the exhibition of contemporary objects of the time of commercial and financial transactions, the wonderful and original exhibition ´Money and beauty. The bankers, Botticelli and the fire of vanities´, which can be visited in the wonderful Palazzo Strozzi until the 22nd of January http://www.palazzostrozzi.org/SezioneDenaro.jsp?idSezione=1214, tries to show how, differently to the majority of the big tycoons of today, the merchants and bankers of Renaissance Florence tried, during a big part of the 15th century, to reconcile their formidable income with the salvation of the soul, by investing them in art, in a way of personal redemption by the means of beauty and the greater good of the city.
In this way, thanks to art, money could participate sacredly in an equation which had, at the same time, plenty of alchemy, as it´s characteristic of a time marked essentially by the growing and developing of magic, astrology, cabbala and hermetic thought. Money, specifically the golden Florin, germ of European commerce, as an element of transmutation of the matter towards the most noble of Platonic ideas, beauty, the source and fundament of all good.
It´s a peculiar exhibition which not only shines thanks to the richness of the objects that can be contemplated in it at the Palazzo Strozzi (as a masterpiece of Florentine architecture, one could argue that it could be a piece of the exhibition in itself), it also seductively invites one to think. Don´t miss it when you rent apartments in Florence
Translated by: aleixgwilliam
